Smart Retries
Also known as: Intelligent retries, Retry logic
Smart retries are the scheduled re-attempts a subscription system makes on a failed recurring charge, timed and spaced deliberately rather than fired immediately, so that the retry lands when the underlying reason for the failure is most likely to have resolved.
Most recurring charges fail for reasons that fix themselves: a temporary hold, an insufficient balance days before payday, a card reissued with a new expiry. Retrying the same charge one second later fails for the same reason. Spacing attempts over the following days — and stopping after a sensible number rather than hammering the card — recovers a meaningful share of them without annoying the customer or attracting issuer scrutiny.
Retries are only half the mechanism. A card that has genuinely expired or been cancelled will never succeed no matter how it is retried, so the retry schedule runs alongside a recovery email asking the customer to update their payment method. The two together are what people mean by dunning.
Curobi runs retries and recovery emails automatically as part of failed-payment recovery on the Pro plan, and reports what was recovered rather than only what failed.